this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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What's a good way to learn about Latex and Git. I've tried learning on my own but it's very overwhelming.
Overleaf is easy to use and has tutorials for LaTeX
Never heard of latex but I can help you with Git.
What you want to know?
}I think you dropped this.
You have to excuse me, texstudio adds automatically the closing one.
Same except that I taught myself. Written two essays for uni already with it and knew from the start that I wouldn't touch word if I didn't absolutely need it.
Latex is confusing, the errors are often even less clear than Python or Java tracebacks, some packages have weird API or don't work together, and I had to make a build script to work with it, but besides that, I have a good language and environment now to create pretty good PDFs with, including VCS with git and not having to use an editor that is not neovim.
If you want to look deeper, there are a few more typesetting languages, some with more modern syntax. Markdown is surely the easiest, but not quite as powerful.
Btw, is
soula real package?Yes, the \LaTeX code I wrote is 100% compilable.
I also learned most \LaTeX myself, school just taught me the basic sintaxis, but is widely used amongst students and academics.
I’m 40 if that helps.
I become a software developer later in life and never had the privilege to go to university, so sometimes I’m out of the loop on older tech.
How did Latex compare to modern Git?
Latex is no versioning tool but a textsetting language. It outputs perfectly formatted Documents after building and takes care of aranging images, quotes and all the tedious stuff so after setting up your template you only have to care about content. It works well with git.
Not like word where adding an image fucks the whole formatting.
Interesting.
Yeah word sucks. I’m a software developer now and have to deal with Word and Excel more than I ever thought I would.
I'm a softwaredev too, we use this for our manual. Its writen in markdown, which we convert with pandoc to latex. We can use git for versioning and merging and the manuals always look very nice.
As a software developer, LaTeX makes writing documents feel elegant in the way good code is elegant. No more manually going back and saying things like "as shown in diagram 4" and updating the number when the number of diagrams changes; LaTeX can do that for you by referencing the object. Citations and bibliography are an absolute breeze to generate. It can generate various kinds of plots and diagrams themselves for you, making it much easier when you then need to make changes to it later.
With the right packages (think: code libraries) you can do all sorts of things. I like the
acrodefandaccommands which lets you specify a bunch of acronyms, and then the first time you use them in a document it automatically expands it to the full version, but uses the acronym on all subsequent uses. When writing code snippets, you can have it automatically apply the correct syntax highlighting for the language you specify; though this is admittedly a feature many markdown implementations also have.Everyone still uses LaTeX for CS/Math at my school. It's not an age thing. Just different circles. I don't think anything similar even comes close to LaTeX yet.
Typst is pretty functional
Ooh, that looks cool. Thanks for the recommendation.
Fuck, I’m ~~old~~ privileged.
Well in this thread people were saying you can set up your own local git repository? What's a newbie friendly way of doing that. I've watched videos and understand that git version control system but I can't quite seem to grasp more than that.
I will answer this, I am sick right now but will return.
You can just create a local repo with
git init, and then never push to a (non existent) remote repository. Git is decentralized, meaning that you always have a functional and complete repo when you're working with it.Depending on your tooling, you probably have a GUI for git if you're a noob, which can usually "initialize a git repo" for you. I use the cli/lagygit tui, so I can't help with that.
Thank you, this clears some things up for none the less.
It is a pity that Markdown does not have the possibilities of Latex.
Typst is Markdown-ish with the possibilities of LaTeX.
I learned latex by doing my engineering homework in it. I quit using latex because I kept doing my engineering homework in it and it turns out it sucks to do
I'm doing my math homework with latex this semester, I'm probably slower but it looks good and is more maintainable.
The issue I had was if it was big enough to need maintainability it was a group project and that meant Google docs or it was math and that meant scrawled on paper. Or technical writing which is the prof that told us to try latex in the first place but I was too busy that semester to learn it
You can do maths in LaTeX and I have used Overleaf for group projects before.
Fair, but this was 10 years ago, we were engineers, and it was hard enough explaining the work I did and the work I needed other people to do to them in a way these people understood.
Also I can’t do math on computers. Like arithmetic sure, but real math, that requires actually writing it down. Idk that’s probably my old lady trait these days
Presumably you do the work on paper and then type it up. I doubt professors would accept paper work nowadays.